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Mark Wallace writes "Maybe the dark does change,
but all we know is what we can't say of it. So we talk of it constantly."
To explore the dark, Wallace uses as inspiration the work of Sheridan
Le Fanu and his work "The Haunted Baronet," a strange and haunting nineteenth
century story. The seventeen poems are, according to the author, a way
of taking the vocabulary of "The Haunted Baronet" and seeing what it says
now.
from the postscript
Maybe the dark does change, but all we know is what we can't say of it.
So we talk of it constantly.
In medieval Catholic countries, ghosts appear when the cycle of sin, guilt,
and retribution has been broken. Ghosts point out where their bodies have
been buried, leading the authorities to discover the murderers. Or the
ghosts are the murderers, unpunished in life, leading people to
the bodies of those they have murdered. If justice is not served in life,
medieval ghosts know, it will be served in death.
[...]
Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Haunted Baronet" is one of the strangest
stories of the nineteenth century. Nothing else in English literature
of that century is like it--it looks most, perhaps, like the tales of
Hoffman. Yet Hoffman's is a world of fantasy, the bizarre and absurd.
"The Haunted Baronet" is a world of horror so subtle that no
one knows what it is.
[...]
In "The Haunted Baronet" the dark we do know is the dark of
History, the dark of modern power and property relations, of money and
class, of men and women. In that dark, the guilty are punished. In "The
Haunted Baronet" the dark of the modern world is the dark of the
medieval Catholic world again.
The dark of the twentieth century is the dark where the guilty are not
punished.
[...]
--MW
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